How a Feel-Good AI Story Went Wrong in Flint
More than a thousand days after the water problems in Flint, Michigan, became national news, thousands of homes in the city still have lead pipes, from which the toxic metal can leach into the water supply. To remedy the problem, the lead pipes need to be replaced with safer, copper ones. That sounds straightforward, but it is a challenge to figure out which homes have lead pipes in the first place. The City’s records are incomplete and inaccurate. And digging up all the pipes would be costly and time-consuming.
That’s just the kind of problem that automation is supposed to help solve. So volunteer computer scientists, with some funding from Google, designed a machine-learning model to help predict which homes were likely to have lead pipes. The artificial intelligence was supposed to help the City dig only where pipes were likely to need replacement. Through 2017, the plan was working. Workers inspected 8,833 homes, and of those, 6,228 homes had their pipes replaced—a 70 percent rate of accuracy. Heading into 2018, the City signed a big, national engineering firm, AECOM, to a $5 million contract to “accelerate” the program, holding a buoyant community meeting to herald the arrival of the cavalry in Flint.
Few cities have embarked on a pipe-replacement program nearly as ambitious, let alone those that have to deal with the effects of segregation, environmental racism, and the collapse of industry in the upper Midwest. In total, 18,786 families in Flint now know that their pipes are safe, because the City has either dug them up and confirmed that they’re copper or replaced them if they were made of lead or galvanized steel. “I think things have gone extremely well,” Flint Mayor Karen Weaver told me. “We’re a year ahead of schedule and under budget.”
But something strange happened over the course of 2018: As more and more people had their pipes evaluated in 2018, . In November 2017, obtained by local news outlet ’s Zahra Ahmad, the city’s estimated that about 10,000 of Flint’s homes still had lead pipes, . The new contractor hasn’t been efficiently locating those pipes: As of mid-December 2018, 10,531 properties had been explored and only 1,567 of those digs found lead pipes to replace. That’s a lead-pipe hit rate of just 15 percent, far below the 2017 mark.
